ice can burn as much as flames do (just in love)
by not a straight trumpet
Summary: Kumiko and Reina find themselves recalling the events of the auditions.
1. ice can burn as much as flames do

**a/n:** so this is the first half of a two-parter i'm doing in honor of the three-year anniversary of 1x11 airing/my heart being made whole again/incredible hibike nostalgia

please watch brausur's amv "ice can burn as much as flames do" before reading this to get the Full Experience

* * *

The events of the auditions weren't something anyone brought up again, not really. The cracks it'd shown, the ugliness lying down underneath everyone, were things most people would prefer to squash down and keep buried. Even Reina, ever the ripper of emotional scabs, went quiet whenever anything referencing that spring came up, so Kumiko never mentioned it - simple as that.

Except it was never that simple, of course, and it gnawed at the edge of her mind like an insistent pug dog until she had no choice but to shake it away, and the best way to do that was to ask Reina about it.

"H-hey, Reina?" It was a greeting she'd used a million times before, but this time it felt like she was already proclaiming her eternal love on top of the world's biggest stage. Reina sat, still as a statue, under the awning she'd spent so many hours practicing on, the awning that Kumiko now (somewhat irrationally, for the awning itself hadn't done anything wrong) hated. It was deliciously ironic that she'd be there of all places, but Kumiko didn't say that. Instead, she took another deep breath.

"Yes?" Reina looked up, setting her trumpet down on her lap. Kumiko gulped.

"Do you, uh, do you remember when we had those auditions in the first year? When everyone was acting r-really weird?"

"I don't think I could forget." Reina didn't look directly at her while she talked, which unsettled Kumiko more than she'd like to admit. "Could you?"

"No." Kumiko paused. "It's j-just, you never talk about it, so I didn't know if maybe you didn't really think about it at all."

"I try not to." Reina put a hand over her trumpet, rubbing the shiny brass. Kumiko sat cautiously beside her, cringing when she realized the bench was still wet from the thunderstorm the night before. Reina seemed unbothered. "Why? Do you?"

"Some of it." Kumiko closed her eyes, tried not to let the worst of her thoughts in. "Kaori-senpai. Yuuko-senpai."

"Right."

"Taki-sensei."

"Of course."

"You." Reina stiffened, just a little, enough that anyone else would think she just happened to be chilled by the still-damp weather. "I m-mean, that was a big part of it. We'd just been to the mountain, what, a week ago? Two weeks?" Kumiko knew exactly what the distance between those two points was, had been using the day of the mountain to keep time since then, but she didn't tell Reina that. She figured it'd come soon enough. "We'd just really gotten to b-be friends."

"I remember." Kumiko wondered if she remembered the hug in the hallway, the way Reina stood on her tiptoes to even reach Kumiko's height, the way she'd smelled that day - lavender and rosemary and brass, always. "Why are you talking about this, Kumiko?"

"It was just a lot of emotion, I guess. Everyone - every _thing_ \- was all heightened and weird and surreal." Kumiko plucked a strand of grass from the ground and rubbed it between her fingers. "S-sometimes I wake up and wonder if I dreamed all of it."

"I know what that's like." Reina moved closer. "Why did it bother _you,_ though? You had your part secured, even at Nakagawa-san's expense, and she didn't mind it." She was so close now, so _warm_ even when her gaze was as distant as the Arctic. "Kumiko, why are you bringing this up now?"

"Taki-sensei." She said it so quietly that perhaps some part of her subconscious hoped Reina wouldn't hear. Reina did hear, and in fact she turned to face Kumiko head-on, violet eyes cold and glassy.

"What about him?" she asked. Kumiko remembered the way Reina's voice had lilted on the word _love,_ how she'd turned red and flopped onto the bench, so unlike herself, that a funny part of Kumiko thought that this had to be a stranger who looked like Reina. She thought about how her heart had stopped, her mind had exploded, the mountain and the hug and the way Reina's finger dragged down her lip all but rolling like a film reel over and over and over again.

"You said you loved him." Kumiko was quiet as a mouse now, but Reina still heard her. It seemed she always did.

"I did." Reina looked up to the sky, just beginning to darken. Kumiko figured they must be the only students left on campus at this point, for how late it was. "I needed you to understand why I . . . acted like that. Told off Yoshikawa-senpai like I did."

"Because you were in love." And of course she understood that. Of course she knew that love made people do stupid, crazy, _terrible_ things, but it still hurt. It still perplexed her.

"Exactly."

"Everyone was so on edge." Kumiko wanted to cry - she didn't know why she was talking like this, why she was pouring everything out to the very root of the problem. "P-people were so upset. Yuuko-senpai would've done anything for Kaori-senpai, and you would've done anything for Taki-sensei, and it was j-just a _mess,_ and I didn't know what to do!" It came as a surprise to both of them how loud her voice was. "I didn't know what to do for you."

What she didn't say: _"You were in love with a man twice your age, and I loved you, and I still do and I can't do anything about it."_

What she didn't say: _"You acted so cold and then you didn't and then you became something else entirely, and I couldn't say anything at all."_

What she didn't say: _"It felt like everything went gray as soon as you said you loved Taki-sensei."_

Instead, she stood up, trembling like a kitten left in the cold, and offered Reina her hand.

"C'mon," she mumbled. Reina looked at her strangely. "I have to show you something."

* * *

 **a/n:** part two to be uploaded soon!


	2. just in love

**a/n:** here it is, part two! i almost cried writing this

please watch brausur's amv "just in love" before reading, and then think about how it's been three years since that episode aired and join me in having an existential crisis

* * *

Kumiko's hunch was right - the campus was empty, which meant the area outside the theatre was as well.

Which meant, of course, that the two of them were completely alone.

"Here?" Reina said, and Kumiko had to admit it didn't really look so magnificent in the evening, without the sun filtered through the glass to cast it all in that dreamy light.

"Do you remember it here?" Kumiko thought she might not survive if Reina said she didn't. She must have, if she still thought over Kumiko's dismissal of the idea of their middle school band winning the Nationals. "W-what happened before you played against Kaori-senpai?"

"I do." She wasn't lying, Kumiko could tell that much, but she had no clue as to whether Reina's version of events was even slightly similar to her own. Reina stepped forward, and her hair swished with her movements.

"Why'd you do it?" Kumiko asked, because there was nothing else to ask.

Oh, she remembered this place well, remembered the way Reina's hand rested on her cheek and her breath was so _close,_ how the room felt like it was shaking, how she promised never to leave and to be the villain with her - whatever that meant, even, she didn't really know and didn't care so much as to ask. All she cared about, in that little pocket of time, was Reina, inches from her face, the now-or-never feeling of the moment that spurred her to echo Reina's words from the mountain - to _confess._

She'd confessed, and Reina'd played the most beautiful sound Kumiko had ever heard, and she was euphoric. She was not just floating, as the books said. She was drifting in space.

But here they were, and the impossibly warm blues of this lobby were substituted for gray, and Kumiko struggled to hold onto the feelings she'd had that day, which was precisely why she stood here, now, with Reina by her side.

"I meant what I said," she continued, because Reina wasn't responding and she had to fill the space somehow. "About being a villain and not leaving you. Y'know that, right?"

"I do."

"A-and the . . . the other stuff, too?"

"Yes, Kumiko." Reina folded her arms, impatient like a child. "What are you trying to say?"

 _"Why'd it turn out like this?"_ Kumiko snapped - almost screamed, really. Reina recoiled, just slightly, and Kumiko felt an awful sinking in her chest. It was a mistake to come here, to overwrite those memories with whatever this was - an argument, maybe, or the beginnings of a breakup for a relationship that never was. "Y-you kept going after Taki-sensei! I thought things were . . . I dunno, I thought they were 'different,' that they'd be different after this!" She gestured to the space around them. She wanted to stop talking, rewind rewind _rewind,_ but the words kept tumbling out of her mouth of their own accord.

"Kumiko-"

"I mean, did any of it mean anything to you? At all?" Tears started leaking out of the corners of her eyes, and she _hated_ that - the only other person who'd ever seen her cry like that was Asuka. "Y'know I was s-so _happy_ after you won the audition and we'd said those things to each other and I thought we'd, I dunno, be together? After that?" Reina said nothing. "I thought it'd just be like that forever."

"I felt like that too," Reina murmured, and Kumiko stared at her, sniffled, wiped the tears and snot away with her sleeve.

"Y-you did?"

"But nothing lasts, does it?" Reina looked at the blade of grass Kumiko had carried in with her, now lying on the floor. It flew weakly for a few feet, propelled by the air conditioning, before going limp again. "I thought that - used it to hide, I suppose. I figured it would pass. I didn't want it to, but it'd hurt less that way."

Kumiko kissed her, consequences and blades of grass and confusion be damned, and it was soft and sweet and fervent, and she thought in the back of her mind that they could've done this the first time if she'd just closed the tiny, tiny difference, but there was no time to think about that.

They had now, and that was something, at least.

* * *

 **a/n:** clap your hands if you miss kumirei


End file.
